Why are there less than 5 known existing tram mods for Railworks? A couple aren’t even released. Maybe it’s because it’s so confusing to mod the game…

Well I’m hoping to get some sort of base working, maybe release it as a pack for others to create content with it. First, I’m trying to make a track with a small curve radius, attempting to mimic an existing track (Oxford Concrete Clean), though I couldn’t get anything to appear in the editor, even just a track rule. In this video, I ended up modifying the track rule for ‘MainLine’, but modifying existing game files is way too sloppy.

I should get back to posting content, so here’s a quick tip if you’re making music, working on a voice track, or pretty much any audio you’re dealing with.

Digital audio has all kinds of fixed limits, one of which is amplitude or volume. If a sound is too loud, the wave will become ‘clipped‘, causing an obvious change in the sound that most people would identify as distortion.

The first thing I would do when I start a blank music or audio project is add a basic compressor to eliminate clipping as much as possible. As an example, this is what I stick on the master FX channel in FL Studio. It’s pretty much the default preset, but the attack and release are all the way down, and the ratio is up. When listening to any sound, quiet or loud, it seems to do the least modification while protecting from clipping. Any compressor should have about the same knobs or settings available for tweaking.

Later on if I’m going for a specific final sound, I could use a more powerful chain of compressors, equalizers, etc, but always have some kind of a compressor on the final master output. Let’s take a look at the difference this makes:

Here is a kick sample where I increased the volume way beyond the original. If left alone, you can see how it is clipping when the limits are hit. It almost looks like a square wave, which is quite a different sound from the original sine. With the compressor enabled, the wave does still change a bit, but it’s not as harsh and won’t be as obvious to the listener’s ears.

Now you may want to have a distorted sound like the drum track or a voice that sounds like it’s on a walkie-talkie. I would stick the distortion chain on a separate FX channel and still have a light compressor on the master channel. This leaves room for other sounds that need to be untouched.

Here’s a papercraft of a TTC streetcar (tram) that was given when visiting the TTC bus garage during Doors Open Toronto. Now the instructions are really vague… I had a hard time building this. For example, the trolley pull just says ‘Join parts B and C‘: Does the slit face the front or the rear? Which way do I angle the trolley pole? I ended up using a little tape to keep it from falling in either direction.

Anyway it looks alright. I want to make some others, like these cool Team Fortress 2 ones. Maybe one day I’ll design my own.